12/06/2010

Can Ghost in the Shell be far behind?

Great leaps in technology happen when someone takes something that exist and tweaks it to either do something better or something it was never meant to do. Before we can even get to the point where motion capture technology moves us into the realm of Minority report where we are physically (in a sense) interacting with digital information, well we get this...

I remember reading an article in Wired way back in 1998, where the head of Sony talked about these think tanks they have around the world. They were taking the best and brightest kids straight out of college and paying them to sit around and dream up stuff. One of the things was this hyper mask that allowed you to steal an image of someones face and wear it like a mask! Another thing they talked about was an invisibility cloak. This is what it looked like back then (see right). You weren't really invisible to anyone with a brain, but it was a start. In 2008 scientist in America and Japan announced they had made a break through in nano-technology that greatly improved what they are now calling Optical Camouflage. Scientists at the University of California in Berkeley developed a
material that could bend light around 3D objects making them “disappear”. Light is neither absorbed nor reflected by the
objects, passing “like water flowing around a rock,” according to the
researchers. As a result, only the light from behind the objects can be
seen. One technique used nano-metre technology-scale stacks of silver and magnesium fluoride in a “fishnet” structure, while another made use ofnanowires tech
that made of silver.As the resolution technology improves so does the invisibility, this is only the beginning! Once they get the tech down, then we can get some sweet wet suits endowed with it and then-The Major!